Category Archives: Weblogs

I just realized it’s been two years since I started TokyoMango. To celebrate, I am taking a few minutes this morning to revisit the early days, and talk about why I started it and what I used to write about.

The Creation StoryI created this blog on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I guess I had a lot of things to say but nobody to say it to. Figured I could blabber about them online. I was also I was going to call it Tokyorgasmic, but didn’t want to attract porn-seekers. I didn’t give the name TokyoMango that much thought. I am from Tokyo, and I like mangoes.The site was hosted on Blogspot until March 2007, when I bought my own domain.The awesome design did not take effect until a few months after that, when I held a design contest and amazingly talented and generous James won and created the beautiful template that you see today.

The First PostMy first blog post ever was an image-less perspective piece about the baby prince and the divorce rate. I said: "If Divorce In Japan was a publicly traded stock, I would be buying so many shares on e*trade right now." I was all talk. Didn’t even have an e*trade account until a couple months ago.

My First Big TrackbackIt was from Gizmodo, on a post about a strange digitized log with speakers that’s supposed to soothe you with nature noises. Naughty now-editor Jason Chen photoshopped little pictures of my face all over the log, and I was super embarrassed. Remember, this was before I started writing for Gawker blogs myself, pre-Boing Boing guest blog, maybe even earlier than the now-defunct Wired blog Table of Malcontents. I had not yet built up my now-stealthy super armor against mean commenters and libelous content online.

It’s been almost three months since TokyoMango came into existence. As I go back and manually update photos from my archives (they got lost in the move from blogspot), I found some fun posts I invite you to revisit–or visit for the first time, if you’re new to the site.

This is not a cut from an audition tape for The Ring. Blogger Geisha Asobi was just fucking around after a haircut, and decided to make several strands into fake eyelashes. They fall off a few seconds later, but homegirl didn’t grow 5 years worth of hair only to have it cut off and discarded like a heap of trash. Here are some more pics of her having fun with it.

I am also the founder of The Tofu Project, a boutique program that helps Japanese entrepreneurs and creators think deeper, tell better stories, and go out into the world in a much bigger way. We work with companies like Mixi, Japan Airlines, and Salesforce.com.

Sometimes I try to explain Japanese culture on CNN, BBC, CBC, WSJ, ABC (so many acronyms!) or in person at places like the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, ETech, and Ignite!